Devlog

Cheat codes, read the same way as everything else

A sixth category per hub, and one more case where reading the engine beat trusting a list - this time catching a fan page's own arithmetic not adding up.

Caesar III's page doesn't come from a cheat site at all. Julius and Augustus ship a game/cheats.c that runs the actual key combination - arm it on a Well's info panel with Alt+K, then Alt+C or Alt+V - and Augustus's own console adds a further dozen typed commands behind the same arming step. That source also settled a detail every fan page glosses over: the money cheat stops paying out once the treasury passes 5,000 Dn, because the engine checks for it.

Caesar and Caesar II predate any in-game cheat box, so theirs are save-file byte offsets instead. Two versions of Caesar's circulate online for what turns out to be the same byte - a hex editor's offset 0x3E and DEBUG.COM's memory address 0x13E are 0x100 apart, which is exactly DEBUG's own load offset. Doing that arithmetic by hand confirmed one version's payout (25,000 Dn) and ruled the other one out: its claimed bytes work out to 32,639, not the 29,000 it advertises.